Reflections on music

Tag Archives: recordings

Of course my moods change, but the average is serenity. I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too.

Vincent van Gogh

A simple melody I came up with while seeking to evoke a feeling of serenity, arranged here for piano and strings.

This is the first recording I’ve made in quite a while. I came up with the main theme (which opens the piece and appears again in the end with a slight variation) several years ago and I started working on it again recently, adding a middle section and arranging the strings.

I always thought of this piece as the background music of some -yet unrealized- film. The title was inspired by Jack Bruce’s Theme for an imaginary western from his wonderful album Songs for a Tailor.

While also connected with the 1960s Civil Rights movement, Paul McCartney’s Blackbird is said to have been originally inspired from the experience of being woken by a blackbird’s song just before sunrise.

Musically speaking, McCartney was influenced by J.S. Bach’s Bourrée from the Suite in E minor for Lute (BWV 996), a piece often performed on the classical guitar. George Harrison and Colin Manley had taught him how to play Bach’s Bourrée at Liverpool Institute. As Sir Paul later put it: “I bastardized it, but it was the basis of how I wrote Blackbird.”

In this recording I’ve tried to bring the two pieces together, accompanied by the singing of birds on a sunny day…

“The souls of men are like flowers, each rooted to its place. One can’t go to another because it would have to break away from its roots… A flower can’t do anything to make a seed go to its right place; the wind does that and the wind comes and goes when it pleases.” (Hermann Hesse, Knulp)